Or Is The Reporting Merely A Reflection Of A Flawed Image?

December 27, 1987|By Ron Dorfman, a Chicago writer who regularly comments on the media.

No matter how Gary Hart rails against the press for its resistance to

``complexity, strategic thought, and genuine character,`` as he did a few weeks ago at Yale, he has demonstrated by re-entering the presidential campaign precisely the same character flaw that was evident in the Donna Rice affair. The media merely amplify the personality that he puts on display.

He can holler all he likes about peeping-Tom reporters and soap-opera journalism, but the question of ``character`` is not now and never has been whether Hart is a philanderer.

The question is whether he feels any responsibility to the cause he claims to champion and to the thousands of people who believed in and worked for him; whether he has the self-discipline to avoid potential scandal even after fair warning; whether, with his party struggling to overcome the embarrassment he caused, he can summon the grace to stay in the background. Whether, in short, he has any cause other than the immediate gratification of his own appetites.

Twice he has answered the question in the negative: first by his preposterous involvement with Donna Rice, and now by trumpeting the equally preposterous notion that he alone can express ``new ideas`` that will invigorate a lethargic electorate.

It`s not as if Hart doesn`t really understand what he`s doing. He himself, as director of George McGovern`s 1972 presidential campaign, was a victim of similar pride, selfishness and irresponsibility.

The Miami Herald and other Knight-Ridder newspapers were about to report that Sen. Thomas Eagleton of Missouri, McGovern`s vice-presidential candidate, had a history of mental illness-a history he had failed to disclose to McGovern before accepting the nomination. Eagleton refused to quit or to provide McGovern with documentation of his claim that the emotional depression and electroshock treatment were minor and non-recurrent, and McGovern was too soft-hearted to force him off the ticket.

Hart has written that as soon as he heard McGovern announce that Eagleton would stay on, he knew the campaign was doomed.

So Hart is deluded if not disingenuous when he says, of the media`s dwelling on the ``character`` issue, that it amounts to ``prying into a candidate`s minutes and hours`` while ``obscuring in the years of a lifetime the undramatic acts of courage, fortitude and determination that reveal true character.``

The character that Hart would like us to think is his was invented for him by pollster Pat Caddell, who also invented Joe Biden. When everything about a candidate is tailored to match the public taste, the only things we can be reasonably sure represent undoctored reality are the images that escape the strategy of illusion: Gary and Donna aboard the Monkey Business; Biden attaching to himself the social history of a Welsh Labourite.

Unlike Biden, Hart was not chastened by the collapse of his bubble. If we are to credit him now, he believes his own hype that he has something to offer besides a giggle: ``new ideas`` that no one else is advancing and that the people cannot do without. But it would be foolish to take him at his word.

Hart does indeed have a platform that includes an oil import tax, investment in education and infrastructure, de-emphasizing nuclear defenses, and other programs. So does each of the six steady-as-she-goes Democrats who have been arguing the issues on television and in the trenches for many months. Some are more liberal, others more moderate; some more pragmatic, others more visionary. On the big issues, like ending the contra war, most of the candidates agree. Where they do not agree, every flag is being carried by one or another; no great cause is going unheralded in this election.

Another explanation, or justification, that Hart offers is that he rode into New Hampshire on his white horse because none of the other candidates has emerged from the pack and achieved national stature. But before New Hampshire, 1984, Hart himself was indistinguishable in the polls from other candidates challenging Walter Mondale..

To explain why Hart has re-entered the race, one is left with two alternatives. One is that it is the only way he can get the million-plus dollars in federal matching funds that he needs to pay off old campaign debts so that he can run again in the future.

The other is that he harbors the notion, as Ted Kennedy once did, that the nomination, or at least the public`s attention, is his by right, and that he is entitled to go after it no matter what the cost to the Democratic Party`s prospects in the general election.

Either reading of Hart`s motivation-and no doubt they are interrelated-not only raises but answers the question of Gary Hart`s character. He is vain, self-indulgent and arrogant, prepared to defeat his party for no cause larger than the gratification of his own ego, just as last May he was prepared to defeat his own candidacy and the hopes and sacrifices of his supporters for the sake of a weekend fling.